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Sunday, October 24, 2010

Harpreet Kaur was as cool as a cucumber when she walked into my clinic. She was calm and collected, she had no worries and her life was on even keel. Her only concern was her facial oedema, a swollen face that refused to subside. In fact, her left eye was so swollen, it hurt just to look at it.

Fear Is The Key

Harpreet was a quiet, middle-aged woman who sat very still, spoke in a measured voice, and kept her sentences very short. She didn’t have much to say, her expression barely changed during our hour-long session and she held it all together very well. Only too well.

And right there, in Harpreet’s calm demeanour, lay the key to her medical condition.

When you watch this video, notice Harpreet’s body language, her discomfiture when asked about her feelings and her inability to even hear some of the questions I asked her.

Harpreet Kaur: Before (Dur 1.57 min)

Harpreet was a woman in extreme denial and she had been for many years. She had learnt to suppress and then repress and deny her feelings rather than deal with them. And over a period of time, numbing herself became a way of riding out the tough times till even the good times ceased to matter.

But don’t we all tend to repress our inner conflicts, anxieties and traumas, which we safely bury deep in our unconscious minds? Sure we do but like Harpreet, some of us use denial as aprimary coping mechanism, which makes us especially prone to ill-health.

Repression is a reflex-like defence that keeps unsavoury and unacceptable memories and the feelings associated with them out of conscious reach. Though unconscious now, these memories determine who we are, what we do, who we marry, the friends we have, whether we have friends at all, the movies we like to watch, and the kinds of jobs we seek.

These conflicts and the deep-seated feelings of abandonment, rejection, bereavement, guilt and resentment they produce shape out basic personality and temperament, influence the way we meet and greet the world, our dominant emotions, the way we handle stress, whether we choose the seat at the font or at the back of the bus, our heroes and idols, whether we like our meals just spicy or chilly hot, the way we carry ourselves, and whether our feminine or masculine side is more dominant.

Childhood Trauma

Most of these painful situations take place when we are still children, when the world is a ‘baffling place’ or when we are infants when the world is a ‘dangerous place’. During these sensitive and vulnerable years, our dominant interpretation of life is largely an unconscious a battle between reward and punishment, and gratification and denial.

Take, for instance, a busy single parent who shushes her two-year-old son every time he wants to cry or grab his mother’s attention because that’s what infants naturally do. But by shushing him, simply because she doesn’t have the time or energy to attend to him, Mom is inadvertently discouraging her son from spontaneously expressing himself. Ergo, he turns into a painfully shy, self-effacing 30-year-old, who bends backwards to accommodate and please everyone in his adult life. His naturally pleasing demeanour is actually a vain attempt to win back Mom’s time and attention!

In this way and a myriad other ways, our adult behaviour mirrors and replays our original conflicts and seeks to resolve them in a self-defeating and therefore self-perpetuating loop.

But how are our traumas connected to disease? Well, just as every single experience we have takes place in a context, our body’s cells too exist in a context. They are directly and indirectly impacted by our temperament, moods, emotions and personality. This – and precisely this – is the psycho-physiology of disease.

These psychological traumas are deeply encoded in our biochemistry which, apart from the genetic template we are born with, is set in our early years. They greatly influence our state of health, our susceptibility to disease and the type of ailments we are likely to develop.

Unconscious Mind: Frozen Fears

Thus, while we lock away our conflicts and emotions at the unconscious level, the impact is frozen at the cellular level, in our biochemistry, in our metabolic processes, in the chemical composition of our cells, in the functions they perform and in our organs and systems. In other words, our painful memories leave a cellular imprint – where psychological trauma leads to cellular trauma.

Cellular trauma and the destructive processes it perpetuates are always at work in the human body. They weaken our immunity, hack away at our organs and can go largely unnoticed for years – till one day, the balance tilts. When the body cannot defend itself and compensate any more, it throws up a smoke signal – an SOS, a cry for help.

You begin to experience a fever, skin rashes, persistent fatigue, a racing pulse, and in more extreme cases organ damage and even cancer or HIV. Harpreet Kaur’s facial oedema was an SOS. The condition developed when her cellular trauma ‘spilt over’.

Consider her complaint in the following perspective. Chronic ailments such as diabetes, obesity, migraine, rheumatoid arthritis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome and autism are not diseases – they are symptoms of dysfunctional biochemistry and destructive processes that have been gnawing away at the mind and body for years.

By taking a detailed case history of the individual, the homeopath’s role is not unlike that of a detective, searching for clues to give a life context to diseased cellular processes. Since our symptoms mirror our traumas, a skilled homeopath divines the physical from the psychological and vice versa.

Are We Two Minds Or One?

What emerges is a comprehensive ‘disease picture’, which reflects the mind and body acting in perfect unison, in sickness and in health. This is the essence of classical homeopathy – and this is the essence of MindHeal Homeopathy. When the correlation clicks and there is a perfect match, the remedy prescribed effects a profound change in the patient – working from the cellular level upwards. Directionally, this process is diametrically opposite to that of psychotherapy though there is no denying the beneficial effects of the latter. For most people, the method of healing is purely a matter of choice.

When a homeopath makes the perfect mind-body correlation, healing is deep and permanent and, not infrequently, patients experience what homeopathy calls ‘retracing’. The patient may spontaneously and inexplicably experience strong memories of conflicts and stresses that are connected to the origins of their disease. These memories are sometimes vivid and bring to the fore the thoughts and feelings associated with them, which explains why some patients feel a tad moody while under treatment.

This ‘eureka experience’ is not unlike an epiphany, where the patient gains a sudden insight into or an understanding of an old conflict or trauma. It occurs when the homeopathic remedy brings the conflict into the realm of the conscious mind and this insight spontaneously resolves the trauma. Essentially, as the homeopathic remedy unlocks and releases the cellular trauma, it frees you from your emotional trauma. And again, this is the crux of MindHeal Homeopathy.

This explains why homeopathy, when used at the mind-body, cellular and genetic levels, produces what that can only be described as a sense of ‘liberation’. That’s why my patients often tell me they feel like “a new person” soon after treatment begins.

I vividly remember my utter amazement every time this phenomenon took place when I started my practice. It was incredible, even uncanny. Yes,this is self-healingat work – setting in motion a gentle reversal of the disease process.Thus, not only do your presenting complaints disappear but your very predisposition to disease. While rebalancing your metabolism and biochemistry, homeopathy also strengthens your immunity and rejuvenates you, leaving you imbued with new vigour.

And before I end this post, here’s something to think about: Though illness and disease sometimes bring anxiety and fear, they are an opportunity to self-heal, to resolve old traumas and to be whole again.

Re-awaken the healer in you...

- Dr Anita Salunkhe, MD

MindHeal Homeopathy is an ISO-certified clinic based in Chembur, Mumbai. To find out more about The MindHeal Way, call: 022-25230530 / +91-9930363981.Or write tocrm@mindheal.com. Website: www.mindheal.org. We’ll be happy to answer all your queries.